Front Burner - How we created the Western wildfires in more ways than one

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

At least 36 people have died as massive fires rip through the Western United States, engulfing towns and blowing noxious smoke north to Vancouver and other parts of Canada. Today on Front Burner, we talk about what’s to blame for this historic devastation and what we have to do to adapt to life with wildfires. Mike Flannigan is a professor with the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta and the co-host of the CBC Edmonton podcast “World on Fire”.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. I'm trying. Get out of your house. Get out of my house. Get out of your house.

Everybody get back. Officials in Oregon are bracing for what they are calling a mass fatality incident. Saying that you will see flames until we get rain in the fall. You can see the red hue, the red orange glow in the sky. We came here a year ago after leaving the Paradise Fire. So now we're evacuating again. Lost everything then, so there's not much to lose now, I guess, for us. But God, this is terrible.

At least 36 people have died as unprecedented fires rage across the western United States, engulfing towns and blowing noxious smoke north to Vancouver and other parts of Canada. Mike Flanagan is a fire expert. In fact, he calls himself a fire guy. blowing noxious smoke north to Vancouver and other parts of Canada. Mike Flanagan is a fire expert. In fact, he calls himself a fire guy. He's professor with the Department of Renewable Resources at the University of Alberta and the co-host of the CBC Edmonton podcast, World on Fire. Today, Mike's here to explain who's to blame for this historic devastation and what we have to do to adapt to life with wildfires?

I'm Josh Bloch. This is FrontBurner. Hello, Mike. Hello, Josh. You know, watching the news right now, the scenes are just horrific. You have five million acres that have burned. People have lost their loved ones, their homes, their pets. I don't have a house. My baby's coming on December. We need a place to stay. We can't pay for it because we lost everything, even our savings.

We lost everything but hope. I was looking at images from the town of Talent, Oregon, and you just see row after row of homes burnt to the ground, burnt to ashes. It smells like sulfur, like fireworks. Oh my god, oh my god. There's nothing here, there's nothing left. How would you describe what's happening right now on the ground in places like California and Oregon and Washington State. Devastating. Horrific. It's really historic, unprecedented. There's hundreds of fires, and some of these are huge fires, including the biggest fire in California history that's getting close to one million acres. Smoke everywhere. And smoke is traveling thousands of kilometers. And if you're actually close to the fires, you can see flames that can be 100 meters

tall. You can see thunderstorms generated by these fires. You can hear the sound like a freight train. You can hear the sound like a freight train. You can see the skies lit up and all this burning embers being carried by the wind and starting new fires. The heat coming off of these is hard to describe. Oh my god, I can hear someone's smoke alarm going off inside their house. Just burned to the ground. And the smoke, it's just thick. And places like San Francisco have been shrouded, inundated with this smoke. And air is toxic.

The worst air quality in the world has been along the West Coast. Portland and up into Canada, Vancouver, it's very toxic at this time. So one newspaper in California says apocalyptic. And it's getting close to that. There's ash that is falling visibly in front of the headlights of the car. Check out my car. This is all ash everywhere. And the scale of it is remarkable. I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of people have been given evacuation orders, and the number of people that are left homeless and also just the number of missing people as well as staggering.

You have rescue teams out with dogs looking for survivors and for bodies. My heart goes out to those people. It's a very stressful time for anyone living there. And yes, there's still lots of people missing. And there's been, unfortunately, a number of fatalities. It was in the 30s last time I saw. And you talk about the individual stories that can be so tragic. I mean, one of the stories that I was reading about of a 13-year-old boy, Wyatt Tofty. He was found inside a car. They believe he was trying to get to that car to essentially find some sort of shelter. He was found with his dog in his lap.

I want to bring in now Susan Vaslev. You are the great aunt. Wyatt tried to drive his grandmother out. Searchers, they found Wyatt with his grandmother. His grandmother as well, Peggy Mosso, died and his mother is critically injured with burns. Peggy Mosso died and his mother is critically injured with burns. When you see the human cost of it on that individual level, it really does hit home just how devastating this all is. It's tragic. And it's even more tragic in that these are avoidable. These deaths are avoidable. You know, the fires, they're unavoidable. There is no vaccine for wildfires. There's no silver bullet. We have to learn to live with fire, but that doesn't mean we can't be more resilient.

And it doesn't mean that we have to lose lives and communities to fire. There's also another toll from the smoke. In Australia, there are devastating fires. Thirty-some people died directly from the smoke. In Australia, there are devastating fires. Thirty-some people died directly from those fires, but there was many more died from impacts of smoke. The Royal Commission looking into the Horribush fire season has heard recovery for some can take five years. We found that there were 445 deaths attributable, excess deaths attributable to smoke from these

fires. I'm afraid that may happen here in Western North America as well. One of the other things that is astounding about the scale of this fire, I mean, I'm in Toronto, I'm thousands of kilometers away from it, and the smoke from those fires have made its way here. Of course, in Vancouver, you know, it's under an air quality advisory. And then seeing images from places like San Francisco where the sun is essentially blocked out. Can you describe what San Francisco has looked like this week?

I mean, if you were standing in downtown San Francisco in the daytime, what do you see? So when the smoke is really thick, the streetlights stay on because there are light sensors. There's so little light coming through. The streetlights stay on because there are light sensors. There's so little light coming through. And sometimes it can have an orangey glow because the sun gets filtered. Sometimes you can't even see the sun. The smoke is so thick.

It's like being in the middle of a dark forest. It's really eerie. And it's a strange glow. I was wondering what time it was. And then I looked outside and it looked like doomsday. I mean, you could tell something is horribly going wrong. It feels like the end of the world. It's pretty scary. It makes me weak for what we've done to my poor state. We've had it here in Canada. I'm in Edmonton and we had smoke from B.C. fires a couple years ago.

And I got up in the morning, went outside, it was bright. And then it started getting really dark. I thought a thunderstorm. I went outside, I smelled smoke. Streetlights came on, hardly see down the block. And that's what's going on in San Francisco. Yeah, I mean, the pictures I've been seeing is where the skies turn entirely red. I mean, it looks like another planet.

It looks like people are on Mars or something. It's 4-11. 4-11. Our sunset is at 8, guys. And that's why the term apocalyptic is being prominent in some headlines, because it is such an eerie, strange condition, that orange-reddish glow. But know that these fires are devastating i've been thinking about the firefighters on the ground and and they seem to be using very much the same tools they've been using for decades to fight these kind of fires but in this case it seems like a real david and goliath battle when they're up against these extreme fires. So yeah, I often say that when these fires are extreme, using water or retardant on them

is like spitting on a campfire. You're not doing much good. But my hat goes off to all the firefighters putting their life on the line, trying to keep us safe. Well, you know, this fire season has been called unprecedented. It's been called record-breaking and historic. Can you put it into context for me? I mean, just how exactly does this year stack up against previous ones? So it's becoming head and shoulders above other years.

And it was an unusual year in some respects. It started off with a record-breaking heat wave this summer for much of the southwestern United States, including California. So you got the heat. And then you had a lightning storm come through in August, which ignited many hundreds of fires. Lightning storms in California in August are rare. So you've got the lightning, and then you've got an east wind event. These are Diablo winds or Santa Ana's in Southern California coming in early September. And it's never come this early before in Northern California. So you get all this, and you get over 3 million acres burned in California alone

and they're growing and we're just starting to get into the prime fire season though. Recent years, their prime fire season has been increasingly longer, including the summer, and California is moving to a year-long fire season is where they're going. Five of the largest California fires in history are burning right now as we speak. And what's going on here is because of the heat and the lack of precipitation, you've got dry fuels. Also, there's some parts of the states have been in a multi-year drought, and there's been a number of dead trees this makes fuel for the fire which means easy for a fire to start easy for a fire to spread more intense fires because there's more fuel more energy being released and the more intense the fire the more difficult to impossible it is to

extinguish so they're going to burn for a while i mean you say a year-long fire season. I mean, that sounds unbelievable that we could just be having perpetual fires. So right now there's over 30,000 fire personnel fighting these fires in the states. I can only imagine the cost of the direct fire management costs, multiple, multiple, multiple millions, tens of millions of dollars per day fighting these fires. And the total bill will be in the billions, let alone the damages, which will be probably measured in tens of billions. The Oregon Department of Forestry says there are more mega fires burning in the state right now than at any time in the last 120 years. than at any time in the last 120 years.

Governor Kate Brown says, I want to be up front in saying that we expect to see a great deal of loss, both in structures and in human lives. This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state's history. So this is, that's why we use terms like unprecedented. And perhaps this is why, you know, the headlines apocalyptic come up as well, though I'm not at that point, because actually, things get worse. All right. It's, it's hard to believe. But yeah, things could be even worse in the future. You know, I saw that there was a study, a 2019 study that found between 1972 and 2018, the state of California has seen a five-fold increase in the areas being burned by fires.

I mean, that's just astounding, a 500% increase. I wonder if you can take me back a couple years. When was it clear that the nature of fire season was changing to this extent? So in California or in Canada, in Canada, I can go back to around the late 70s, the weather started to change. Yes, I was around in the late 70s. And yes, I was studying fire in the late 70s. The weather started to change.

And now things start to get warmer and more extreme. And it's important to understand that extremes drive the fire business. Your information about California is correct. The area burn has increased 500% since the early 70s. But Western United States, 1% of the fires burn, 99% of the area burn. Canada is not much different. 3% of our fires burn, 97% of the area burn. So most of these fires happen on days of extreme fire weather, hot, dry, windy days. What does that mean? What does that statistic mean? Can you break that down for me? Sure. Most of the fires are put up when they're small or go up by themselves when they're small, but there's a relatively small number that cause all our

problems. And this is tied to this extreme weather and the extreme conditions. I mean, and of course, we've seen these massive fires in Australia and then as well this summer in the Arctic Circle of all places. Fires are not unusual in the area, but scientists are sounding the alarm bells over the high number. They say the wildfires appeared earlier. June saw emissions rise to 10 times the average of previous years. So, yeah, it's important to realize that, you know, there's three ingredients for wildfires.

Fuel, the stuff that burns grass, needles, leaves, shrubs, trees. Ignition, people and lightning. And third, conducive fire weather. Generally hot, dry and windy, but dry and windy can work as well. So wherever you are, Australia, Arctic, Amazon, California, British Columbia, you need all three ingredients. And what drives this is, you know, how dry are those fuels? And you can have massive wildfires.

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50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples. I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I have a kind of obvious question, but clearly climate change is playing a role here. Can you just describe how does rising temperature exacerbate these wildfires? So we found that as temperatures increase, we're seeing more fire activity. There's actually three reasons for this. The first is fire seasons are getting longer. And we're seeing that in California, we're seeing that in Canada, and we're seeing that in other places in the world. Second, the warmer it gets, the more

lightning you have. Research suggests for every degree of warming, you get about a 12% increase in lightning. And all things considered, more lightning means more fire. But all things aren't the same because the warmer it gets, the more efficient the atmosphere is sucking moisture out of the fuel, which means our fuels will be drier unless we see more precipitation. And we haven't seen that recently in California or Australia. So drier fuels means easier for fires to start, easier for fires to spread. And it means that there'll be higher intensity fires that are difficult to impossible to extinguish. So that's why we're seeing these extreme wildfires.

I mean, what else are we doing to make these wildfires worse? So over 50% is due to climate change. But there are other factors, and people are involved in all the other factors, okay? So we're living in the wildlands. We're starting fires either directly or indirectly through our infrastructure, like power lines, for example. And we're not doing proper forest management everywhere. So I mentioned that there's been a drought, there's been lots of dead trees in California. Those should have been removed because now when a fire burns through those, those are the extreme high-intensity fires that are so challenging.

And I know it sounds counterintuitive, but explain to me how fire suppression has actually made the problem worse in some ways. In some ways, in some ecosystems, it has, yes. The idea is to allow fire on the landscape when and where possible, and that creates a mosaic of recently burned patches. And for forests, a recently burned area will not reburn for many years, 10, 15, 20 or longer. And if it does burn, it's usually lower intensity so it can be put out. So we want this idea of fire is bad, is wrongheaded, it's fire is natural, and that we should eliminate fire from the landscape. I mean, there's much we can learn from our indigenous peoples that live thousands of years on this landscape using fire. And so sometimes we have to use some fire, or at least thinning the forest to prevent more fires.

So we need fires, but we need to have controlled fires, and that should be part of the forestry management is to allow fires to burn, to eat up some of that fuel so that when these big extreme fires come around, they have less ability to move at a pace and grow at the rate that they've been growing. Yeah, a little smoke now or a lot of smoke later. The problem is there's always a chance that the fire could escape despite your best efforts, and this has happened in the past, and communities have been lost due to prescribed fires. So there's a lot of people who are risk-averse or communities that are risk-averse don't want fire and associated smoke. So aside from addressing the bigger issues of climate change, I mean, what else do you think

should be happening right now to avoid the kind of devastation that we're seeing to people's homes and people's communities? So first, every community should have an emergency management plan. This is useful for flooding, fire, earthquakes, any kind of disaster, so that you're prepared. The way we build our homes should have fire in mind. And there's a number of efforts in Canada that are just doing that. Building codes, responsibility, and governance is a real issue with that. So we should build back better. And in some places, we should be careful about where we build back.

You know, the analogy to a floodplain. Community planning is another aspect that we should employ when we build new subdivisions or build a community. You want to have fire breaks around the edge of the community. And it can be things like soccer pitches, baseball diamonds, golf courses. Greengrass is a very effective fire break. Sprinklers are very effective, though you have to keep in mind when you use sprinklers, you need independent power and independent water.

Because when a fire enters the community, like Fort McMurray and Slave Lake... A raging wildfire now moves in, devastating the heart of Canada's oil-producing region. A wall of flame lapped at the side of Highway 63 and jumped the city's major thoroughfare. Tens of thousands were ordered to leave. One of the first things that goes is power and then water supply, water pressure. You should consider other options other than evacuations. You could have community centers that are fireproof and have a proper fresh air supply. So it's much easier than everyone jumping in their car and driving down the highway that's getting clogged.

Human-caused fires are preventable. We do a pretty good job, but I think we can do a better job with human-caused fires. And we can't do much about the day-to-day weather until we get a handle on global warming. We can't do much about lightning until we get a handle on global warming. Mike, in the long term, if we don't change our approach to this, and if we don't take action to combat climate change? If we stay on this same trajectory, how bad could things get? What kind of things might happen?

Things are happening faster than I thought they would. And I don't want to give people the wrong impression. Not every year is going to be a disastrous year. But on average, we're going to see more fire and we're going to see more extreme conditions. A larger death toll, a larger cost. Some people say the new normal. There's nothing normal about this.

It's our new reality. Lots more fire in the future. We expect a lot more. Mike, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Oh, my pleasure, Josh. You can hear more wildfire analysis from Mike Flanagan by listening to the CBC Edmonton podcast, World on Fire. It's a five-episode show that takes listeners to the front lines

of out-of-control wildfires in Canada, Australia, and California. Find it on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today. I'm Josh Bloch. Thanks for listening to FrontBurger.